Contents

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Tidy: Warning: missing <!DOCTYPE> declaration

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Cause:

A DOCTYPE Declaration is mandatory for most current markup languages and without one it is impossible to reliably validate a document. The DOCTYPE defines the version of the document like : HTML 4.0.1, XHTML 1.0, 1.1, ...

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Examples:

Good
<html>
<head>
<title>document without DOCTYPE</title>
</head> ...
Good
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" 
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>XHTML-document</title>
</head> ...
Good
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" 
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>HTML-document</title>
<head> ...
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Solution:

Please place a DOCTYPE declaration as the very first thing in an HTML document.

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References:

Retrieved from "http://www.htmlpedia.org/wiki/Tidy_44"